Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call
"religion." There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close
to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of
Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties
demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to
contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson
reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the
sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed. More
than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson's account demonstrates
that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a
valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in
Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded
Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national
ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans
and female mediums to the category of "superstitions"--and thus beyond
the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion
in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not
only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism,
Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle
but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion
today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important
perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular,
science, and superstition.
